3K Drug Overdose Deaths In NJ Last Year As Nation Sees Increase

NEW JERSEY — About 3,000 people died from drug overdoses last year in New Jersey, according to provisional federal data. That's about 7 percent more than the prior year, as the nation continues to see more fatal overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

The CDC estimates that 107,622 people died from drug overdoses in the United States in 2021 — up about 15 percent from the prior year. Opioid deaths increased from 70,029 in 2020 to 80,816 last year, according to the health agency's projections.

Annually, New Jersey has suffered around 3,000 drug overdose deaths since 2018. The state reported 1,587 in 2015, but opioid deaths have become far more prevalent since. Former President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a public-health emergency in October 2017, as opioid overdoses and deaths continued to climb.

NJ's total of 3,046 overdose deaths in 2021 is a projection from the National Center for Health Statistics, which incorporates reported and predicted provisional overdose death counts into its 12-month counts.

New Jersey's Office of Chief State Medical Examiner of the chief medical examiner reported 3,046 overdose deaths in 2021. Here are the death tolls by county, compared to each county's number of confirmed overdose deaths from 2020:

• Atlantic: 188 in 2021, 216 in 2020
• Bergen: 220 in 2021, 182 in 2020
• Burlington: 162 in 2021, 149 in 2020
• Camden: 335 in 2021, 288 in 2020
• Cape May: 63 in 2021, 63 in 2020
• Cumberland: 68 in 2021, 76 in 2020
• Essex: 408 in 2021, 356 in 2020
• Gloucester: 110 in 2021, 129 in 2020
• Hudson: 207 in 2021, 179 in 2020
• Hunterdon: 30 in 2021, 19 in 2020
• Mercer: 138 in 2021, 128 in 2020
• Middlesex: 254 in 2021, 220 in 2020
• Monmouth: 174 in 2021, 186 in 2020
• Morris: 84 in 2021, 99 in 2020
• Ocean: 242 in 2021, 245 in 2020
• Passaic: 155 in 2021, 185 in 2020
• Salem: 25 in 2021, 36 in 2020
• Somerset: 56 in 2021, 63 in 2020
• Sussex: 32 in 2021, 48 in 2020
• Union: 145 in 2021, 143 in 2020
• Warren: 28 in 2021, 36 in 2020

State officials have different provisional overdose-death tallies than the CDC, but the CDC does not list county-level data for overdose deaths.

New Jersey has reported 1,116 suspected drug deaths so far this year. See the state's drug-death dashboard for more data.

Overall, drug-overdose deaths increased about 27 percent nationwide in 2020 — the first year of the pandemic. Substance-abuse experts pointed to self-isolation, a more dangerous drug supply, disruption of treatment and recovery services, and greater levels of social and economic stress as some of the reasons.

New Jersey bucked the trend, but continued to sustain higher fatal-overdose numbers than before the declared opioid emergency.

"When you're hanging around 3,000 a year, I take no solace in that," Gov. Phil Murphy said in November. "We're going to stay at it until we break the back of this."

Murphy signed three bills into law last January designed to combat the opioid crisis. The laws include the removal of certain barriers for harm-reduction services to distribute sterile syringes and establish local drug-overdose fatality review teams.

Johnson & Johnson — one of the state's largest companies — also played a role in the crisis and announced in 2020 that it would exit the prescription opioid business in the United States altogether. J&J was among four corporations that agreed in February to pay roughly $26 billion to settle a tsunami of lawsuits linked to claims that their practices fueled the opioid crisis.